A few years ago, when theater producers decided they wanted to adapt the 1982 Michael Morpurgo children's novel "War Horse" -- more recently turned into an Academy Award-nominated film by director Steven Spielberg -- into a play, they turned to Cape Town, South Africa-based Handspring Puppet Company to create their star, the four-legged Joey.

Handspring, founded in 1982 and led by Artistic Director Adrian Kohler and Executive Producer Basil Jones, had shown with 2004's "Tall Horse" -- the story of a giraffe caught in the southern Sudan -- that they could bring to life a large animal through puppetry.

"I think the challenge came at exactly the right time for us," says Jones, who, with Kohler, took part in a recent telephone interview from South Africa. "I've got a feeling we wouldn't have been capable of rising to this challenge 10 years earlier."

They were told about the story, in which a farm boy and a horse develop an incredibly strong bond before the horse is sold to the British army and sent off to the battlegrounds of World War I. It is a story in which the main character is on stage for about two hours and does not speak.

"It seemed a very appropriate way to tell a war story through a different point of view," Kohler says. "It was creatively exciting."

Taking what they'd learned from "Tall Horse," the puppeteers at Handspring began to design Joey. Initially, they thought two people under the shell of a horse would be sufficient.

"And it worked fine, except when the horse was moving," Kohler says. "The front person couldn't manipulate the head, only the legs.

"We fairly rapidly realized we needed three manipulators."

That third person would have to be outside the horse, guiding the head with a pole. And although the head could be positioned between the audience and the puppeteer much of the time, he would be visible. The key to that working, they found, was making the horse's movements as realistic-seeming as possible.

"We went for more and more naturalism for the horse," Kohler says, "which made it easier and easier for the audience to simply not see the manipulator."

Even with three people sharing the load, the job of performing as Joey is far from easy.

"It's physically very demanding," Kohler says. "They're constantly having to balance different weights and respond to unspoken signals from each other."

And that naturalism for which they strive takes research into horse movement and physiology.

"They read everything about horses," Jones says. "They (visit) horses and quite often live with horses for a few days."

And what they can't learn from books or in person? How does a horse look when it coughs? When it drinks? When it falls down?

Well, that's what the Web is for, obviously.

"All these things are actually available on the Internet or in film, and that's very much part of the research they do during the training period," Jones says.

Oh, and did we mention the horse has to appear to be breathing?

"Breathing our beginning point to giving our creation some (life)," Kohler says. "The breathing of the horse is one of the (main) emotional indicators.

That training period, which also includes practicing basic walking, galloping and rearing, lasts about two weeks. And then begins eight weeks of actual rehearsal, they say.

"At the end of the 10 weeks, really, they are proficient, and we tell them, 'You are now at the beginning of your work,'" Jones said. "And the work becomes, slowly over time, more amazing until it becomes sublimely good -- and that only happens after a month or two.

"At a certain point, the horse show really crackles."

(He adds that audiences seeing a trio performing Joey earlier on in their run will be sufficiently impressed and won't know that it can still be better.)

Multiple productions of "War Horse" -- London's West End, Broadway, the national tour about to come through Cleveland's PlayhouseSquare and others -- have been prosperous for Handspring, which has expanded big time in recent years.

"It's been a real revolution for us as a group of artisans and crafts people," Jones says. "We've gone from employing Adrian and myself full-time to employing 20 people.

"It's a bit of a bubble," he continues, "because this will only happen once, and it's already beginning to tail off."

"War Horse," for which Handspring also brings to life several other horses, a goose on the farm, crows and more, is seen by the pair as a tribute to horses and man's relationship to them, which was hurt by the war and its introduction of destructive machinery, they say.

"Our claim is it's the first piece of theater that put an animal in the center of a two-hour show and treats the animal as a being rather than sort of some anthropomorphic version of ourselves," Jones says. "Historically, I think that's what 'War Horse' will be remembered for.

"It's kind of been done before, I think in film, but in theater it's much harder to do, and I think this is the first time it's been done."